Suspiciously High Power Bill Leads to Marijuana Arrests
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 4:45 pm | By: Radical Russ
Suspiciously High Power Bill Leads to Marijuana Arrests | Firstcoastnews.com | Local News
JACKSONVILLE, FL — A tipster and a look at a JEA bill has led to 4 arrests for growing marijuana in Atlantic Beach.Jacksonville Sheriff’s Officers arrested 3 adults and a juvenile after finding a garden in a closet Sunday afternoon.
Police say they received a tip that marijuana was being grown at the house at 859 Rudder Rd., and checked the JEA bill, which was several hundred dollars higher than the neighborhood average.
According to police, officers knocked on the door, and could already smell marijuana from the porch. The homeowner, James Floyd, answered the door and confirmed there was marijuana in the house.
Police arrested 44-year-old James Floyd, his wife Tara Floyd, 39, and his son James Philpot, 23.
When they searched the house, police saw a closet that had been converted into a grow room, complete with many lights, tin foil-lined walls, and jugs of water.
Police also arrested a juvenile who told police that Philpot bought the marijuana and all of the paraphernalia used for growing and smoking it from the internet. The juvenile said Philpot told him he was tired of buying marijuana, and wanted to grow it himself.
Police confiscated the marijuana and the things used to help grow it in the closet.
Oh, those ever-helpful “tipsters”, protecting our neighborhoods from adults growing marijuana in a closet so they can smoke it and not support some black market dealer. It’s such a relief that the electric company won’t have to make those extra several hundred dollars a month, too.
The only thing that is accomplished when police raid home closet grows is the ruining of people’s lives. There is not the slightest dent in the overall consumption of marijuana, the chances people will try marijuana, the amount marijuana costs, how hard marijuana is to get, or how many people want to smoke marijuana. The more you bust the closet grows, the more people turn to the black market dealers whose profit trails lead back to the death and corruption created by the drug cartels.
Whether and how we ever fully regulate cannabis sales is a worthy debate, but continuing to prohibit personal private use, possession, and cultivation of a non-toxic mildly-psychotropic weed is without a doubt the most wasteful and counter-productive government program ever.
Topics: closet grows, Florida, Jacksonville, James Floyd, James Philpot, tara Floyd
